Feb. 8, 2013, Washington, D.C.: Majority Democrats in both houses of Congress on a party-line vote yesterday passed sweeping new legislation radically affecting the behavior of all Americans. The bill, crafted by recently re-elected President Obama, levies steep new taxes on those who fail to conform to a host of health and environmental mandates.

Nancy Pelosi, once again speaker of the House, insisted that these new taxes are clearly not penalties. Citing the landmark Supreme Court decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts in June 2012, “They couldn’t be penalties,” she explained. “That would be an unconstitutional abuse of the Commerce Clause. These penalties — oops, taxes — are within Congress’ power to levy, as Chief Justice Roberts made clear when he voted with the progressive wing of the court to uphold the Affordable Care Act.”

Included among the new taxes is a 20 percent income surtax for failure to install solar panels on the roof of your residence or commercial building. This was justified by the necessity of replacing conventional energy sources with sustainable alternatives in order to save the world from human-caused global warming.

An obesity tax will be levied in progressive increments on all persons exceeding the newly established federal body-mass standard. When filing their annual income tax returns, all Americans will be required to submit IRS Form 1040, Schedule O(bese), certifying their official height and weight, as verified by U.S. government weigh stations that will be positioned along sidewalks in every ZIP code across the country, just as trucks are weighed. The $1.2 trillion cost of this program was hailed by newly appointed Treasury secretary Paul Krugman as a much-needed economic stimulus that will create 2 million high-paying government jobs. “This will bring the unemployment rate back under 15 percent” said Krugman, “and, based on the Keynesian multiplier effect, will more than pay for itself.”

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Let’s hope this isn’t our fate, the slippery slope when Congress exceeds its enumerated powers and rationalizes that, under its power to tax, it can mandate almost any kind of personal behavior in the name of the public interest. The remedy is to vote out Obama and Democrats in Congress, and the repeal of Obamacare.

Justice Roberts has been criticized by disappointed conservatives for his contortions of logic in saving Obamacare by rewriting the language of the act to magically transform the law’s repeated description of a “penalty” into a tax, a term the president himself flatly denied. Roberts asserted that “the mandate is not a legal command to buy (health) insurance. Rather it makes going without insurance just another thing the government taxes, like buying gasoline or earning income.”

Huh? His analogy fails. Gasoline is a commodity Congress lawfully subjects to an excise tax. And what one earns may be subject to an income tax under the 16th Amendment. But your decision not to buy insurance is a discretionary behavior, heretofore not subject to taxation. Can you think of anything else you decide not to do that the government “taxes”? This is frightening new territory that further opens the door to Big Brother’s control of your life.

On the other hand, Roberts has been commended by conservatives for his forceful rejection of the administration’s original defense of Obamacare for declaring, “Construing the Commerce Clause to permit Congress to regulate individuals precisely because they are doing nothing would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority.”

It’s hoped this will stand as a precedent, drawing a line in the sand on future congressional abuse of the Commerce Clause.

That remains to be seen. The four liberal justices, who reject originalism in favor of a “living Constitution,” all dissented on this point. Should Obama be re-elected and the court’s liberal bloc grow to a majority, Roberts’ “line in the sand” might be quickly erased.

Freelance columnist Mike Rosen’s radio show airs weekdays from 9 a.m. to noon on 850-KOA.

There’s been way more than enough written about Donald Trump’s battle with kneeling football players — especially with a major crisis underway in Puerto Rico — but one thing really does bother me that’s been revealed during this brouhaha: the extent to which many Americans have accepted the anti-democratic and false equivalence of patriotism and the military.